DSLAB project awarded Gold Prize at OSS World Challenge 2013

06.12.13 - Cloud9, a project developed in the Dependable Systems Lab (DSLAB) by Stefan Bucur, Cristian Zamfir and Prof. George Candea, was awarded Gold Prize at this year's Open Source Software World Challenge. It's an annual competition hosted in Korea intended to promote open source software and expand various exchanges among open source software developers all over the world. Gold Prize is the second highest award given.

Today, software developers spend inordinate amounts of time testing and debugging their code; in spite of this, bugs still plague modern software. Cloud9 is a tool that employs symbolic execution and reasoning to automate the process of testing; it draws its name from the expression of being "on cloud nine." Cloud9 was the first system to parallelize and linearly scale symbolic execution on large cloud clusters, as well as the first to devise a complete and concise model of the POSIX operating environment, thus enabling efficient testing of multi-process multi-threaded software that uses files, networking, etc. Cloud9 found bugs (and helped increase test coverage) in widely used software, like memcached (used in most large-scale Internet services), several web servers (including Apache and lighttpd), as well as the Python interpreter.

Research in the Dependable Systems Lab (DSLAB) focuses on the dependability of software systems, with particular emphasis on reliability, security, and safety.

Stefan Bucur is in his fifth year of a PhD program in the lab. He works on scaling automated software testing to large real-world systems. Cristian Zamfir recently finished his PhD. He developed execution synthesis, a technique for automatic debugging of software. Prof. George Candea, who heads the lab, focuses on practical ways of achieving reliability and security in complex software systems.